


Some Kind of Crooked Angel

by rabbit_hearted



Category: The Boys (TV 2019)
Genre: F/M, i just want these two to be HAPPY for fucks sake, little vignettes and headcanons
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-13
Updated: 2020-10-13
Packaged: 2021-03-07 17:15:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,165
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26981251
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rabbit_hearted/pseuds/rabbit_hearted
Summary: And when he dipped her, with all of those dusty bullet shells and broken angels as their witnesses, it felt a bit like flying.
Relationships: The Female | Kimiko Miyashiro/The Frenchman
Comments: 29
Kudos: 94





	Some Kind of Crooked Angel

To him she was _mon coeur._

Perhaps he knew her even before they met formally. Perhaps he had nestled somewhere in her consciousness, needling at the edge of her brain, weaving constellations. Perhaps they had always been tangled at the heart line, fated by karma, by boardwalk fortune tellers and sidewalk cracks. Perhaps it was only a matter of time before they drifted into each other’s orbit, solidifying the thing both had already known existed in some iteration. 

And so when he held her hand and said “ _Bonjour, Kimiko,”_ she felt the start of something, the unfurling of some glorious spit of untouched road. 

And in her head she said, _Bonjour, mon coeur._

  
  
Tonight, he brings home pizza. 

He knows that she doesn’t like to be snuck up on, so he makes a lot of noise when he comes home — rattling his keys and stomping his boots and knocking his knuckles against the edge of the doorframe. 

He pauses in the threshold of the living room, appraising her with a twitching, impish grin. “You’ve been drawing, _oui?”_

Paper clippings litter the floor like snowfall — fragmented drawings of palm trees silhouetted against moonlight, waves lapping against craggy shore, Kenji’s hand clasped in hers. 

_“I’ve been thinking about him today.”_

He told her that people die twice: Once when they take their last breath, and again, when their loved ones stop talking about them. And so she speaks him back into existence, even in this small, quiet way. Her hands are still clumsy, all tight, angry lines and harsh shadows, but Frenchie saves all of them. Most are stored in bulging, weathered binders he keeps in a shoebox under their bed, but his favorites are preserved in frames and hung around the house. 

He sets the pizza box down and crouches beside her, pointing to the drawing of the hands. “I like this one, _petit.”_

_“Me too.”_

They sit cross-legged on the floor, splitting greasy slices over _Wheel of Fortune_ reruns and trading stories about their days. Kimiko leans forward, making a “V” with her forefinger and thumb, and places it flat over her outstretched palm. 

Frenchie smiles, mimicking the gesture. “I’m saying ‘pizza’?” 

Kimiko nods. Even after all these years, she still finds pieces of herself to share with him.

 _“You look pretty today,”_ he signs. His technique is still a little clumsy, but then, no one can be quite so fluent as Kenji. 

_“Yeah, right,”_ she replies, smirking. She leans forward and brushes her thumb over his chin, wiping away a bit of sauce, and pops it into her mouth. “ _I_ _haven’t even brushed my hair.”_

His gaze flits across her face, darkened and roving. “Come here, _mon coeur._ ” 

She climbs onto his lap, their pizza all but forgotten as he finds a new purpose for his mouth, drifting over her chin, the shell of her ear, the curve of her neck. He whispers french against her skin, words she doesn’t recognize but which speak to her all the same, in the way he has always — her true north, her fixed point. “ _Belle,_ ” he murmurs, again and again, into her hairline, like an incantation. “ _Belle fille._ ” His thumbs find the hinge of her jaw, and he tilts her face up until she meets his gaze, churning with all wicked alchemy, all dark magic. “You are perfect to me. You understand?”

Kimiko sighs into his neck, mouthing at the jutting point of his collarbone. _Yes._

  
  
  


_A memory:_

_The first time they danced was below a pawn shop in East Flatbush, tucked away under swinging sodium-yellow lights and the deft weight of his hands in the places where they wove patterns over her skin. They pretended they twirled within an opulent ballroom rather than a mildewed basement, that they were different people_ — _smarmy dignitaries who rubbed elbows at charity events, who kissed babies and worried about nothing in particular. Their feet crunched over empty bullet shells and they told each other it was stardust._

_Dancing was a tricky thing, see, all sure-footed confidence she didn’t possess, but he kept time for them both, murmuring encouragement against her neck. He told her that dancing was like drifting within the swell of a wave, and that you could only conquer it once you succumbed. “Let go,” he said._

_And when he dipped her, with all of those dusty bullet shells and broken angels as their witnesses, it felt a bit like flying._

Somehow, they make it to the bedroom. Everything they do feels a little desperate, as though they’re running out of time. Amidst all of the bruising kisses and damp breaths and clashing tongues, he’s ripped off her oversized Ramones t-shirt until she stands only in her strawberry-printed bra and matching panties. She’d bought them as a joke, but now, as he pulls a ragged breath through his teeth and then flicks his gaze up to her, she gets the sense that she’s made a monumental, perfect mistake. 

He strides across the length of the room and lifts her so that her legs are wrapped around his waist. She stares down at him with blown pupils and kiss-swollen lips, one hand ghosting over the nape of his neck, the other trawling a languid path down his spine. 

“You are going to kill me,” Frenchie whispers.

He grows watchful, focused, cut horizontally by swathes of sunset through the half-closed blinds. His thumbs press into her hips when he sets her on the edge of the bed as gently as though she were made of moonlight. 

Kimiko smiles, gently mocking, and tweaks his nose between her fingertips. _“You don’t have to be so careful with me.”_

Frenchie kneels in front of her, framed by her kneecaps on either side _._ “No,” he murmurs devilishly, pressing his lips to the inside of her thigh. “You are no porcelain doll, _mon coeur_.” 

  
  
  


_A memory:_

_She wanted to feel the ocean again. They took off down the coast and vowed to drive until they hit South Carolina, only because Frenchie had seen Myrtle Beach on a postcard once and wanted to know whether the real thing lived up to the picture._

_“There’s no way sand can be that fucking white,” he said, driving with one hand on the wheel, the other placed palm up on the edge of the open window._

_“Maybe,” she signed. “It always looks like that in the movies.”_

_“Exactly. Movies lie.”_

_Kimiko smirked, kicking her feet up on the dash. “Bitter old man,” she replied._

_“Bitter old_ — _Blasphème!” He cried, chucking a handful of trail mix at her. She tossed her head back against the headrest and drifted to a dreamless sleep, lulled by the beat of briny air against the windshield and the scratchy croon of French rap music._

_Hours later, she was awoken with a feather-light kiss on her shoulder-blade and a finicky, goldspun sunset. She yawned, blinking out at the broiled horizon line. He parked at a squat motel with a sunken porch and salt-beaten shingles, and, through the tangle of cattails and bramble, she could see the ocean. She scrambled out of the car and slid onto the hood, resting her chin on her bent knees._

_They sat in silence, listening to the white noise of the waves and the caw of a circling seagull overhead._

_“See?” She signed, gesturing to the ocean with a flick of her wrist. “The sand really is white.”_

_Frenchie leaned back on his elbows, twisting a half-smoked cigarette between his forefinger and thumb in quiet reverence. “I suppose it is.”_

  
  
  


They drift between one another like light through space, like air through capillaries, ancient and life-giving. He knows that she doesn’t like to feel trapped when they make love, so he lets her set the pace, ghosting gentle trails across her skin as though reading the surface of her skin. 

They’re quiet save for their gasping breaths and whispered promises, quiet, nonsensical platitudes. She curves one fist in the bedsheets, the other around his cheek, and just before it’s over, she presses her forehead against his and sighs his name, because there is only ever him, as wild and impossible as the surface of the sun. 

_“Serge.”_

  
  
  


_A memory:_

_She took him to her village— or, more accurately, the place where her village used to be. Her boots crunched over debris as they ambled up the crest of the hill in silence. Frenchie casted worried, sidelong glances at her throughout the grim pilgrimage, but still she pushed on, desperate to see with her own eyes what she already knew to be true._

_When they reached the peak, she tossed a pebble down the ravine and watched it skid over the barren, burnt earth where she took her first steps, played card games on overturned barrels, snuck extra helpings of sticky rice._

_“I’m sorry, mon coeur. I’m so sorry.”_

_She turned her face up towards the sky and screamed for the first time in years._

  
  


After, they split a cigarette in the rumpled bed sheets and watch the moon through the cracked window. She doesn’t normally smoke, but tonight, she wants to know if it still tastes as acrid and unforgiving as she remembers. Her father used to smoke hand-rolled cigarettes, and she and Kenji would sometimes steal one and split it long after her parents had gone to sleep, each coughing up their lungs and trading progressively scarier ghost stories until one of them begged the other to go back inside. 

_“Still tastes horrible.’’_

Frenchie chuckles, tracing lazy patterns over her bare chest. “Good.” He plucks the cigarette with his free hand and slides it between his lips. “Don’t take up this shitty habit, _mon coeur._ ” 

_“Hypocrite.”_

When he raises himself up on his elbows to pull his shirt back over his head, the moonlight illuminates the fingernail-shaped scar on the back of his head, a little milky patch where his hair doesn’t grow. 

_“What is that from?”_ She asks, tapping it with her finger. 

Frenchie palms at the back of his scalp, his expression suddenly shadowed with an unpleasant memory. “Ah, that.” He snuffs the cigarette out on an ashtray and rolls back over to face her. “A lifetime ago, before I met you. I was, er, pistol-whipped. You know this term?”

Kimiko nods, swallowing thickly. Her rage still swells within her, an ever-present companion, though she learned how to make some semblance of peace with it long ago. Still, that phantom tension splits her in two like a lightning strike. 

“It was a long time ago, my love. There is no need to get upset.” 

_“Who did that to you?”_

“My father. He was drunk.” 

Kimiko rolls onto her back, scowling at the ceiling. _“Stupid fucker.”_

Frenchie laughs, and then he pivots so that he straddles her hips, hovering above her like some sort of crooked angel. When he speaks, her breath is a warm lash over her cheek. “You have a temper on you, little spitfire.”

_“I’ve been told.”_

He bows his head and huffs a laugh into her neck, threading his fingertips through her hair. “Let’s put it to good use, then.”

And they do. 

  
  


_A memory:_

_One day, he handed her a corner of the world._

_“It’s not perfect, mon coeur. It’s not even pretty yet. Don’t get your hopes up.” He turned down a side street and they flew past pastel-colored mailboxes and picket fences, venturing further into the wilder countryside and rolling, patchwork hills and bloated blue sky._

_“It’s already perfect,” she signed. Her forehead was tilted against the cool glass of the passenger-side window, desperate to drink in every detail as they drew nearer._

_He drifted his thumb over their intertwined hands, each adorned with a simple metal band he’d welded himself. They didn’t have a wedding, of course. They eloped in a musty courthouse with a hungover officiant as their only witness to their commitment, which felt fitting, somehow._

_“We’ll fix it, though. Paint it, change the flooring.” He glanced at her, smirking. “None of this is scaring you off?”_

_Kimiko shook her head._

_“It might have cockroaches. Rats, even...”_

_She grimaced, shifting away from him in her seat. “Tell me you’re-”_

_“Joking.”_

_“Dick,” she signed, and he howled loud enough to be heard over the blaring radio._

_But then, at last, he pulled the car to a stop in front of an old ranch house painted the color of dusty yellow chalk and a faded bruise, and it was perfect, just as she knew it would be, even if it wasn’t pretty. She supposed, later, that nothing was quite so fitting for them as an ugly ranch house poised on the precipice of the world._

_She wrenched open the car door and leapt to her feet, cutting through the unkempt lawn, Frenchie’s laughing voice floating somewhere distantly behind her._

_Home, she mouthed. She pressed her index finger to the hollow of her throat, and then she threw her arms wide at her sides, her face tipped into the sun._

_Home._


End file.
